Since the unexpected news of his death, the Second Life community has quickly rallied to pay tribute to him and to help his bereaved family. Their relationship began in and around Second Life.

“We first met on the old SL forums,” Nephilaine remembers. “He was a regular poster and, as we know, a personality you can not ignore. I thought he was funny, if a bit rough.”

In-world, you’d often see him flinging objects across Second Life sandboxes, or possibly flying around on a toilet.

“His avatar was a Djinn, short as he could make it, stocky, and intentionally just kind of hideous looking. I think it was his protest against the drive in SL towards perfection, towards standard beauty and the heavy element of vanity. He had zero use for that, his avatar was a warning to people: I don’t care how you look. I’m interested in what you DO.”

Their first real life meeting, at the 2007 Second Life community convention, was just as memorable:

“He was tall, that was the first thing I noticed,” Nephilaine recounts. “He towered over me by over a foot. And he had on a T-shirt that said ‘I SHAVED MY BALLS FOR THIS?’ So, you know. He did leave an impression.”

“[I] discovered what most people do --- that he was an utterly honest person and what you saw was what you got.”

Neph and Sig in SL

They remained casual friends in the years that followed.

“When we started talking a bit more often, and the deep compatibility between us became obvious. Neither of us wanted to admit it, he was too shy (strange to think, I know) and I was too stubborn. But it eventually came out, and what came next was absolutely the best years of both our lives.”

Their first date was a Leonard Cohen concert in Vegas, where Siggy lived at the time. Nephiliaine flew to him from Georgia. “Anthem” was their favorite song from the show.

Thursday, June 28, 2018

Postmortems, a new book by renowned MMO game designer Raph Koster, recounts his many years building classic virtual worlds like Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies, and Metaplace -- his attempt to build the metaverse -- and the lessons they impart to current virtual communities. (3D, VR, or otherwise.) Reprinted with permission of the author, how player killing in Ultima Online relates to Twitter and Facebook, and why Metaplace failed to grow.

As I was working on the book, I was struck repeatedly by how relevant so many of the old lessons were to what’s going on today on the Internet. For example, the many revelations about social media manipulation and the utter ineffectiveness of major operators like Facebook and Twitter to control bad behavior on the part of their users was much on my mind as I wrote about the history of Ultima OnlineUO was notorious for freeform playerkilling, which the market rejected decisively even though the game offered freedoms and fun that simply couldn’t be had in other games. That tension between freedom and griefing continues to play out…

If a player was killed by another player (and wasn’t a criminal at the time, and was of good notoriety, and so on), a window would pop up letting them report the crime. A player could choose to not report it, if they felt it was an accident or the incident was an instance of good roleplaying, but honestly, this just about never happened. People always reported.

Once the killer got too many reports, everything in their bank was instantly confiscated. Any gold they had became a bounty on their head. They instantly became a Dread Lord along with all the penalties that accrued thereto. And their name, description (hair color, skin tone, and so on) went on the local bulletin board, along with the bounty on their head.

Reports could age out, so you could avoid a bounty by spacing out your kills, but bounties never went away. And if you kept getting reported, your bank account would be repeatedly confiscated and the gold added on. Eventually, victims were able to add their own gold to the reward as well.

If a murderer was killed by a player who had less murders than they and who was neutral or better in notoriety, they suffered an immediate loss of 10% of all of their advancement. And their head was chopped off and put in the backpack of their killer. Returning the head to a city guard near wherever the bounty was posted resulted in the reward being given to the bounty hunter.

The update notes cheerfully noted:

Bounties may remain posted in other cities even though the reward has been claimed, but a given bounty can only be claimed once in the world, unless the killer returns to their ways. This will likely result in a killer who has bounties in multiple cities getting killed over and over again by eager reward claimants, for no gain. Our advice is, don't end up with lots of bounties on your head. :)

Ah, frontier justice. And there were indeed high hopes that these penalties, which seemed extravagant at the time, would do the trick.

Spoiler: they didn’t.

Murderers quickly figured out the threshold number of reports and how quickly they aged out, to dance along the line. Then they started making a point of storing all their valuables in their houses instead of in a bank, so that there was no reward or confiscation to worry about. When players started supplying their own money for the rewards, the murderers simply began treating the bounty boards as a twisted form of high score table. They would coordinate with another player who would create a new character with a spotless record, allow the murderer to be slain, swallow the stat loss death penalty, and split the money!

If all of this sounds hilarious, consider that it’s basically the same patterns that are used today on sites like Reddit and Twitter. Only there are no admins who actually answer when you call for help.

Today, with the resurgence of interest in social virtual worlds driven by networked VR, it’s easy to see people incredibly fascinated by the potential. But there are still pretty significant audience hurdles between what we have now (as popular as they may be with those who already “get it”) and the dream of the widely adopted metaverse.

Further, it looks increasingly like we already live in an ambient metaverse of sorts, one without all the heavy barriers of dedicated clients and 3d rendering, much less goggles and headsets.

Up next: The rise fall of Metaplace -- and the rise of the everywhere metaverse:

Wednesday, June 27, 2018

Another data point from Realities 360 worth noting, via Superdata's latest VR/AR report: According to its market survey, only 18% have tried and liked virtual reality, while just 11% have tried and liked augmented reality.

Contrast this with the number of people who still want to try VR or AR: 1 in 3 and 1 in 4, respectively. With virtual reality, the mystery is why they haven't tried it even once, with so many VR headsets (if we include Google Cardboard and Gear VR). With augmented reality, these numbers may imply some confusion with what "AR" actually is; Pokemon Go and Snapchat are massive hits that many people enjoyed (for at least awhile), and definitely have AR or AR-eseque features.

These survey numbers are consistent with the report last year that a major retail chain closed up much of its Oculus demo stations for general lack of interest. And so four years after Oculus' $2 billion acquisition by Facebook, it's fair to assume (unless sales numbers substantially budge) the total market for VR content is roughly around 18% of the consumer market. Which isn't necessarily bad -- that's about the size of the population who enjoy hardcore PC and console games. A niche, in other words, but a large one. It's just a mistake to assume this market is going to grow any larger.

With VR we need to support both audience groups. Support those who need to learn w/others by creating ways for others to participate and remove aspects of the experience that are creepy.For those who need solo learning experiences, give them an honest way forward.#Realities360

Jaron recommends social VR experiences where the people not in VR can contribute to the VR experience somehow. [I.E. like the @keeptalkinggame game.] "This works -- it creates a role for everyone & it's not creepy." He wants more like that in educational uses of VR. #realities360

Educators using VR often try to deny the awkwardness of wearing VR headsets. The better solution, says Jaron Lanier, is to *embrace* the headset: "You're like a samurai, it's great... instead of making them cool & black, they should look like carnival masks." - #realities360

"We're stuck with this problem right now where if people see each other in VR, they look wooden and creepy." Until we solve this Uncanny Valley problem, Jaron Lanier recommends avatars that are NOT realistic. #realities360

Tuesday, June 26, 2018

This is the trailer for an upcoming series of live piano recitals across Japan, and it comes with a remarkable twist: Michal Horák, the pianist, is being billed in the show by both his real name and his Second Life one: arabesque Choche.

Arabasque, as longtime NWN readers know, is part of the groundbreaking Chouchou, which originally began as a Second Life-based music duo who performed in the virtual world, even while separated in the actual one: Arabasque streamed his piano playing from Tokyo, while the singer, Juliet Herble, streamed her vocals from New York. (Read my 2008 profile of them here.)

They’re currently sitting at approximately 10,000 monthly active users across all Unity-enabled devices (that means PC, Mac, Linux, browsers, and viewing capabilities on mobile) with about 10% of those users being in VR, primarily Rift and Vive. Sinespace is mostly a third-person experience, but if you’re in VR, the view shifts to first-person.

That isn’t a lot of VR users right now, but it still puts them just below VRChat and Rec Room in terms of sheer reach and size... But most importantly is that the business is making money for itself and its users already. On average, a user currently spends about $17 per month in Sinespace. That’s a lot more than the $0 people spend in Rec Room at the moment, for example. And of all users that have returned to the app after trying it for the first time, they typically average just over two hours per day inside Sinespace.

Some background on the webcam feature, which (in my very biased opinion), is pretty cool:

Should landowners pass along their savings - I have the feeling a lot will, to remain competetive - their tenants will recover a lot of the increase. It's also very likely that, given an across the board drop in rental expenses, tenants will go for larger parcels of land (thus necessitating more sims) or use their savings to buy more Lindens. It's a win-win.

So that's one plausible forecast. "Lyn B" isn't so optimistic about how the L$ purchase fee increase will impact the company:

Friday, June 22, 2018

Click here to visit a beautiful new experience from metaverse art master Cica Ghost (ably featured in Pepa Cometa's machinima above): A kind of intricate, giant, moving music box that seems to be from the 19th century of an alternate, lovelier universe. I've always admired Cica Ghost's scenes, but wished they had more animation; this new experience manages movement beautifully. And it's huge! Look at my avatar in relationship to Cica's world: